Xbox Security Keys Changed

anth writes: "A couple a months ago we discussed some reverse engineering of the Xbox which discovered the security code. The last paragraph of this letter from Nvidia says MS changed the code, and that they had to write off chips with old code as a result."

Comments

not really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Modchips cost $5.
29F040 chips loaded with a proper .bin work fine.

dunno how much money im loosing here....

And when the next xbox rev. is hacked, and the next chips costs $5 as well, everyone will be laughing, because we all know Microsoft can't create a secure system if their lives depended on it

Re:Guess Nvidia didn't read the EULA

[Phil Wilkins]

> About time they returned some of their ill gotten gains to the consumer. ...except that it's actually going down the toilet, not back to the consumer.

Re:This is a nice move from Microsoft

[Space cowboy]

Not by end users. I suspect that the equipment to reprogram them costs more than an xbox

Actually FPGA's are normally programmed using EPROM's. Most FPGA's these days are actually static RAM cells, which are programmed at power up by reading data from an EPROM. EPROM burners are pretty cheap...

But in any case, FPGA hardware is ridiculously cheap. Go to fpgacpu.com and see for yourself - a 300,000-gate FPGA environment complete with programmer and s/w for ~$170 US. If you want a cheaper one, you can get 150k-gate ones for ~$120 US. Considering that a 32-bit CPU is ~20k-gates, that's pretty good :-)

Simon

Re:News for Felons. Stuff that's illegal.

[m00nun1t]

You don't OWN Windows XP in the way that you OWN your car. You simply have a single PC LICENSE, which conveniently comes with some install media.

Some goes for the vast majority of commercial software.